Should You Take Online Courses?

yes you definitely need to take online courses but you probably didn't click on this video for a five second answer so let me explain a little bit more in depth why online courses are so great and even why they may not be a good fit for you [Music] welcome back to web dev simplified my name is kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner and in this video we're going to talk about online courses which are one of the best ways to jump start

your experience as a developer and get you to being a full-time working developer even quicker now i consider myself a bit of an expert in this field because i have created multiple online courses myself some being as short as four hours and others as long as 40 hours and on top of that i've taken multiple online courses myself some as cheap as you know five ten dollars and others many hundreds of dollars expensive so i kind of have a range of courses i've created and taken but on top of that i think i have a

unique experience because when i was learning web development i did almost all of my learning completely for free without using any online courses so i kind of have a good experience of using courses and not using courses so i can really compare and contrast the two for you now the first thing i want to talk about is going to be the purpose of an online course many people kind of misinterpret the purpose of an online course and they think that the only purpose of an online course is to hide away some information behind a paywall

which forces people to pay to find that information and learning when in reality pretty much every online course on the internet including my own all of the content is available for free somewhere all the content on my javascript css react courses you can find that in documentation youtube videos blog articles even many of my youtube videos cover the same concepts inside of my courses the main difference though between all these free resources and the actual paid resources is these paid online courses are giving you a path to follow from beginning all the way down to

the end that is going to lead you from where you are right now to where you want to be so if you want to be a javascript developer my javascript course is going to take you from the very beginning knowing nothing about javascript all the way to being a confident javascript developer that can use all the features of javascript that clear and concise path that leads you from beginning to end that was carefully constructed by the teacher of the course that is what you're paying for not necessarily the actual knowledge within the course the knowledge

is available for free but being able to take all that knowledge make sure that it's all in the correct order and learned in the most optimal way that is what an online course is going to do for you if instead you try to use just free resources and you watch a few of my videos on javascript a few other videos from other people on javascript maybe you read a few articles look at free code camp and you get all this javascript information and you compile it all together and try to learn from it you're going

to learn a bunch of javascript information but you may be trying to learn things that are too advanced or you're trying to learn things that are too beginner or maybe you skipped a few things in the middle and you don't really know that because you don't know what the correct path is or the correct order to learn everything maybe some of the information is outdated and it just takes you so much time to parse through all the information and figure out what's good what's bad where you're missing things where you're not where you need to

go next that's all difficult stuff and that's all stuff that online courses do for you and that's really what you're paying for it's not the knowledge it's the actual path of that course that you're paying for so i urge you when you look at an online course to purchase i recommend looking at the path that it's going to take you down does it look like the instructor spent time crafting that path to make it the most optimal for you or did they just throw in a bunch of information willy-nilly and it doesn't really matter that's

one of the most important things to look at and in this next section of the video i really want to talk about the different types of courses out there so you can figure out which of the best courses for you to spend your money on because it does cost money to buy these courses so you want to make sure you're getting the perfect course for you now the way i look at online courses is there's essentially three different tiers there's going to be cheap courses there's going to be mid-tier courses and then there's going to

be expensive courses and these three different tiers really sum up the different types of courses you're going to get cheap courses are going to be courses that are pretty affordable they're like 50 or 100 or less these are the things that you're going to find mostly on places like you to me you're going to find tons of courses in this cheap price range you know 10 20 30 these courses they can be great but generally they're going to be lacking something one of the biggest complaints i see with these courses on udemy is that they're

huge i mean these courses are 40 50 60 70 hours long and they just try to pump as much information into the course as possible without actually caring about what the order the information presented is what's actually important versus not they may teach you a bunch of outdated stuff only to add length to the course and then tell you later hey you don't actually need any of that information because it's outdated so really looking at a course and saying oh in this course we build 94 projects and it's 150 hours long that may sound really

good on paper but in reality are you really going to sit through 150 hours of courses in 90 different projects when in reality you could learn all that content in one tenth of time so that's one thing to really consider is it just wasting your time and padding out your time a lot of cheaper courses do that also many of these cheaper courses due to the fact that they're selling for a cheaper price they just aren't able to spend as much time working on the actual curriculum in the order of it i know for me

when i'm creating a course i spend over 50 percent of the time that i work on the course just planning out the order of the content and the exact content in the course so that i can make sure the path is optimal for you when you're trying to learn this is something that many course makers that do these cheaper courses aren't able to do just because they can't justify spending double the time creating the course when they're selling it for such a cheap price also something i see a lot with these courses is they focus

a lot on memorization where they just give you a bunch of information and expect you to memorize it for example they build out a really big project and all you're doing is typing along following along the project and then by the end of the video all you've done is build one project and you kind of just memorized how to build one project i talked about this in a previous video on how memorization is a bad way to learn code and many of these cheaper courses follow this memorization technique now the next tier of course is

going to be mid-tier courses and personally this is where i think you're going to get the best bang for your buck these courses will generally cost you anywhere between about 50 and 500 and this is actually where all of my courses fall in when it comes to pricing the main reason i feel that these mid-tier pricings for the courses have a little bit more bang for your buck is going to because there's more time spent on the actual structure and the path of the course itself many of these course instructors are individuals such as myself

or west boss kevin powell where we're really trying to take our course and construct it in a way that we know will lead you to the exact path that you want so if you take my javascript course for example it's perfectly structured so you learn javascript from the very beginning all the way through to the more advanced concepts and you never actually have any missing points in your knowledge one thing that i see with a lot of people that are self-taught and use a bunch of free resources is they kind of miss things they skip

through things that they don't realize they're missing i know when i was learning i did it entirely without online courses and i missed a ton of pieces of knowledge when i was learning and later i was able to learn those things by purchasing online courses that were walking me through those things that i missed when i was self-teaching myself when it comes to these types of courses pretty much all of the extra money that you're paying for them is going to the time that the instructor spent making sure that the path is going to be

the perfect optimal path for you which is why these prices for these courses are higher but they're going to make your learning experience much better and your overall retention of this knowledge is going to be much better when you complete the course due to the way the path was laid out now the final tier of course i want to talk about is going to be expensive courses and these ones are courses are going to be 500 or more in general these types of courses i feel like don't actually add that much more value for the

increase in price because they start to get very expensive very quickly some of them being tens of thousands of dollars or more and they really start to compete with going to a private university or doing a boot camp or doing like one-on-one coaching or mentoring these are techniques that a lot of people use when they have extra money they want to spend and they just want to guarantee good results they'll go to a boot camp or do some one-on-one coaching but that's very expensive and online courses are great alternative a much cheaper approach they can

give you almost all of the same benefits as a boot camp or for example one-on-one coaching now these expensive courses they really don't have any better structure in my opinion than the mid-tier priced courses the main thing you're going to be getting is a bunch of additional bonus content and this bonus content is almost always going to be things such as one-on-one coaching group mentoring and things like that and these things are something that you most likely probably don't need really you're trying to learn a particular skill for example javascript so you buy a javascript

course and this javascript course is going to teach you everything you need and that's going to be great but then you have all these extra benefits such as mentoring one-on-one coaching and things that you don't even care about so why are you paying you know hundreds and hundreds of extra dollars for these benefits when you really only care about the course itself that's why i think these more mid-tier priced courses are much better because they're going to give you more bang for your buck you're going to learn the same amount of information and you're going

to save a ton more money in the process now there's definitely a time and a place for these more expensive courses and if you really value the extra features that you're going to be getting for the money you spend by all means go right ahead and purchase it but if all you really care about is the content of the course generally you can find a course in the more mid-tier price that's going to give you the same exact content with a very good structure and save you a bunch of money if you're not using the

additional features now i also mentioned the beginning of this video that sometimes online courses are not a good option and when you are strapped for cash or you just have tons of time but not very much money to spend then learning for free on your own is the way to go that's why when i was learning web development i did it all on my own for free without buying online courses because i didn't have much money to spend and i had tons of time to be able to spend learning so i didn't really mind spending

extra time taking my time learning and watching through all these tutorials and piercing through all the outdated information now if i had the additional money i would have loved to buy some online courses because it would have shortcutted the amount of time i spent drastically and i would have been an overall much better developer but at the time i just didn't have the money to spend so of course i just went through and used free resources which is why if you don't have the money or you have a ton of time definitely utilize all the

free resources you have available but if you have some extra money or you're strapped for time these online courses are going to be one of the best things that you can buy to be able to jump start your career as a web developer now with all this talk on online courses it would be terrible for me not to shamelessly plug my own courses i have a course on javascript react and css they're going to be linked down in the description below each of these courses i spent months painstakingly crafting the path that you follow from

beginning to end to make sure that you end up a stronger developer by the end and are able to jumpstart your career as a web developer so if you're interested in any of those courses they're going to be linked down in the description below and with that said thank you very much for watching and have a good day